Coalition's End

by Karen Traviss

  “So what do we do next?”

  “I think I might need to negotiate.”

  “With Prescott.”

  “With Hoffman and Michaelson. This is about transport. I want to see if they’ll defy the Chairman if it’s the pragmatic option.”

  “Bit risky, sir.”

  “If the worst happens, Yanik, we know how to get out fast, and we now have some fuel to do so.”

  “Changed your mind on standing with the COG?”

  “No. Just recognizing that none of us can possibly predict how bad the situation might get.”

  “Good luck with getting out of the harbor, then. Michaelson’s blockaded us before, remember.”

  “Ah, he’s a sensible man. They have their imulsion now, and they can work out how to extract it without us, so why would they want to keep us here against our will?”

  “Because we’re good company and we do the dirty work that the COG’s too squeamish to tackle?”

  “I think they’ll learn to shoot Stranded without us, Yanik.”

  Trescu kept an eye on the fields and woods to either side, working out where the north-south fissure would lie relative to the road. The approach road to the naval base and its surrounding shantytown was clogged with refugee traffic. Trescu could see Armadillo APCs and farm vehicles pulling off and parking on the grass while Gears tried to marshal the traffic. The line spilled back out of the main gates. The entrance to the Gorasni camp was the other side of the jam.

  “So much for COG efficiency.” Trescu wondered how the COG had ever managed to evacuate Jacinto when they sank it. They’d had just hours. Clearing Pelruan—a fraction of Jacinto’s population—was taking weeks. “They’re losing their touch.”

  But there was nothing he could do to bypass the jam. He used the idle time to work out how to confront Hoffman about oddly clandestine radio transmissions while begging him for a ride to the mainland in a Raven at the same time. He didn’t have the leverage of an imulsion platform now, but then he probably never had. Once he’d placed his nation’s fate in the hands of a much larger force, they could have taken what they wanted. He had no idea why they hadn’t. They did seem to believe their word being their bond, at least most of the time.

  “You can see the locals never had to run from grubs.” Yanik pointed out pickups in the vehicle tailback, heavily laden with furniture and ornaments. “So much useless stuff. No sense of priority.”

  Trescu glanced up at the side of a flatbed truck that had pulled off to the edge. He found himself looking into the face of an elderly man with that trident badge on his lapel, the Duke of Tollen’s Regiment. The man didn’t so much look at him with loathing as with indifference. Trescu had seen the veterans only once when the first Gorasni refugees landed at the naval base. Pelruan was an even more foreign country than the Jacinto shanties.

  “Careful,” Yanik murmured. “I’ve been spat at more than once.”

  “That won’t kill you.”

  “It’s still… disturbing.”

  “You’re too sensitive.” Trescu looked at his watch. “What the hell’s going on up there?”

  He jumped down from the pickup and started walking along the line of vehicles, catching a lungful of exhaust. Damn, couldn’t these wasteful idiots even switch off their engines? He could feel eyes on him as he made his way to the head of the line and the source of the delay. It turned out to be inside the naval base gates.

  A couple of Gears were arguing with a man driving a covered truck. It struck Trescu as one of those peculiar COG weaknesses; the island was being invaded and here they were, letting some civilian debate about his damned nonexistent rights. It wasn’t going to change a thing. He strode up to the Gears and intervened.

  “What’s the problem?” he demanded. “Get this line moving.”

  “I’m not going to give up my food.” The Pelruan civilian jerked his thumb over his shoulder to indicate something in the back of the vehicle. “I damn well worked for that. We’ve already shared the town stores. I’m not giving up my larder as well.”

  The Gears didn’t look like green recruits, so they should have known how to deal with this by now. Trescu had had enough. He wrenched open the door and pulled the driver out by his collar. The man pitched sideways and fell out, prompting murmurs and aahs from civilians watching the confrontation.

  One of the Gears—a man in his forties—put his hand out as if to stop him.

  “Whoa, sir, there’s no need—”

  Trescu hauled the driver to his feet and slammed him against the side of the truck. “I am part of the COG now, yes? I am an officer of the COG, then.” The average Gear— even Baird—seemed to think he was an army officer, not a naval one, but it didn’t matter. He still had the authority they’d accidentally given him. He turned it on the civilian. “You—you will do as you are told. We all face a crisis. There is no me. Only us.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” the man yelled. “You can’t treat me like this! You’re not even a Gear! You’re a fucking Indie!”

  The man didn’t matter, so Trescu didn’t bother to backhand him. One of the Gears put his hand on Trescu’s shoulder.

  “Sir, don’t.”

  “If you can’t deal with this, I will.” Trescu shoved the protesting man aside and climbed into the cab to start the engine. “I shall park this in the compound, and then it will be unloaded. Do we understand?”

  Suddenly it wasn’t about being kept waiting but about teaching these people that they had to obey orders for the common good, and that there was no luxury of discussion about it. He could hear the commotion around him, but it was sullen muttering, nothing more. See? Someone has to do it. They’re soft. All of them. This community needs strength. He drove into the base, looking for trucks being unloaded by Gears, and parked the vehicle at the first likely spot.

  “Here!” He gestured to one of the engineers. Ironically, he knew more of them by sight than he did the combat troops. “No doubt an angry civilian will stop by later to protest about his rights. Feel free to shoot him.”

  “Right you are, sir,” the engineer said, unmoved. “I’ll mention that at my court-martial.”

  The line was moving much faster now. Trescu dodged past the steady flow of vehicles looking for Yanik who, he was sure, would have the sense to take the pickup and wait for him at the entrance to the Gorasni camp. He was about fifty meters from the gate on the far side of the parade ground when he saw Marcus Fenix bearing down on him from the right, looking even more grim than he usually did.

  He was too busy watching Fenix to pay attention to what was happening on his left until movement caught his eye and a something smacked hard into his face. His ears rang; blood stung his lips. He didn’t fall, but he couldn’t see much for a few seconds. His fist balled instinctively as someone grabbed his wrist so hard that it hurt.

  “You don’t want to do that,” Fenix said.

  Trescu tried to clear his head. A punch in the face like that was enough to disorient anyone. When he recovered enough to look around, he realized he’d been punched by a very old man, one of the Tollen vets. People were starting to gather around them in that flashpoint kind of way.

  “Okay, we stop this now. Everybody—beat it.” Fenix had hold of Trescu’s elbow and was trying to steer him away, one hand held out as if to fend off the old man. “We’ve all got enough to deal with. You too, sir.”

  Fenix wasn’t talking to Trescu. He was addressing the veteran. The old man, skin transparent and spotted with age, nursed his hand while Trescu just stared at him, surprised at the weight he’d put behind that punch. He looked as if it had taken every scrap of strength he still had left.

  Very sensible, Fenix. Thank you. Hitting frail old men is bad for diplomacy right now.

  “I’ve waited forty-five years to do that,” the old man said. “I just wanted to pay back one of you bastards before I died. And I hope you rot in hell.” Then he turned on Fenix. “And you, Sergeant—your damn father should have fini
shed them all off with that Hammer of his when he had the chance.”

  There was nothing to be said at that moment that wouldn’t have made matters much worse. Someone stepped forward to lead the veteran away. Fenix’s gaze flickered for a moment and he looked taken aback. So some things did get under his skin—things about his father. Adam Fenix was a war criminal, the creator of a weapon of mass destruction that had forced the UIR to surrender in the Pendulum Wars and was used again to sacrifice the rest of Sera to save the COG heartland. Trescu was careful not to blame a son for his father’s sins.

  “Welcome to the Monsters’ Club,” Trescu said. “It’s very exclusive.”

  “Do me a favor, Commander.” Fenix had managed to thin out a busy area in moments. Suddenly there was nobody within ten meters of them. “People are cranky at the moment. Leave us to handle the wayward ones.”

  “I have enough cranky ones of my own to occupy me, Sergeant,” Trescu said, wiping blood from his top lip. “And you don’t have to atone for your father, any more than I need to atone for mine. Although he would think I was the one in need of forgiveness for breaking a deathbed promise.”

  Fenix gave him a strange look, not the resentment he expected but a searching expression, as if Trescu had come up with an answer that he’d been seeking for a long time.

  “Yeah, I know neither side had the moral high ground,” Fenix said. “And we all fail our fathers.”

  And if you and your comrades hadn’t captured the Hammer technology from the UIR at Aspho … would we have used it on the COG eventually? Almost certainly. Then did you enable your father’s crime? This is the problem with justifying outrage. It can’t be done. Causality falls apart and we’re back to our tribalism and excuses.

  “I certainly failed mine,” Trescu said, wondering what nerve he’d managed to hit. “But his life’s mission was to preserve the Gorasni people, and I can’t be inflexible about how we achieve that.”

  Fenix just met his eyes and nodded. The moment of revelation had vanished and he just looked tired and frayed. “Glad we’ve got our priorities straight,” he said, and walked away.

  Trescu’s instinct was to head back to his own camp. But he could go anywhere on Vectes, and anywhere within this naval base. It was time to visit Zephyr and see how maintenance of the submarine was going.

  And check what they’ve picked up on the radio.

  Then he’d ask Victor Hoffman a few questions.

  SUBTERRANEAN STORAGE AREA, VECTES NAVAL BASE.

  “Goddamn it,” Hoffman said. “We got through two wars without turning into a rabble, but ask some asshole to hand over their pickles and suddenly we’re brawling like drunks.”

  Marcus walked down the tunnel ahead of Hoffman, switching on lights as he went. Old fluorescent strips and even older incandescent bulbs speckled with dead insects flickered into life. “It probably popped the pressure valve with the vets. That’s something.”

  “How did Trescu take it?”

  “The pickles or the vet?”

  “The vet.”

  Marcus paused for a couple of beats as if he was trying to pick the right word. “Calmly,” he said.

  The underground tunnels were usually silent but Hoffman could hear echoing voices. Sharle had taken over some of the storage areas for accommodation. Hoffman was surprised that anyone was willing to sleep down here, but perhaps it seemed safe to the folks from Pelruan. The dread of tunnels and being underground was a legacy of fighting grubs, and that was something they’d never had to face.

  “Trescu’s full of surprises,” Hoffman said.

  Marcus made a grunt that might have been agreement. “Okay, it’s down here. Turn left.”

  “Just as well we didn’t burn this stuff.”

  “You’ve got Dom to thank for that.”

  Hoffman never expected to have a normal conversation again with Marcus after the fall of Ephyra. What did you say to a man you sent for court-martial, and then abandoned to die in a prison overrun by grubs? Yet somehow they’d managed to grunt their way through a long drawn-out apology of sorts over the last couple of years, and now things seemed to be back to the level of mutual respect he’d had with Marcus before the fall of Ephyra.

  He refused my orders. He punched me out. Damn it, I could have forgiven the punch, but… I couldn’t overlook the rest. Could I? We lost Ephyra. He went to rescue his useless know-it-all father instead.

  His father died anyway. Hoffman didn’t have to be a mind reader to know that Marcus was still beating himself up about it.

  Maybe he’s got no room left to nurture a grudge against me. Yeah, we’re both drowning in guilt. And I still say his father wasn’t worth it.

  Hoffman wished he hadn’t said as much to Marcus, though. He’d earned that punch.

  He made an attempt to keep the ragged conversation going. “You think I’m barking up the wrong tree, Fenix?”

  “If you’d seen what we saw at New Hope,” Marcus said, “you wouldn’t ask me that.”

  Like all the COG naval bases Hoffman had ever seen, Vectes was built on top of an underground labyrinth of storerooms, shelters, armories, magazines, fuel tanks, and machinery spaces. It reminded him of a tree, as much of it below ground as above. And most of it looked exactly the same as the next bit if you didn’t keep an eye on the rust-speckled metal signs at the intersection of each passage.

  But Marcus seemed to know exactly where he was in the maze. He turned left and kept walking to the end of the tunnel. A pair of paneled doors reflected the dim light.

  “Some light reading,” he said, turning the handle.

  As the door swung open, Hoffman found himself in a vaulted storeroom lined with wooden shelves and crammed with box folders. If all the boxes were full, there had to be hundreds of thousands of documents in here. He fought down a moment of daunted panic—how many months to read this stuff?—and reminded himself that the COG was tidy and methodical. The records would be in some kind of order.

  “They’re arranged by year,” Marcus said. “Which doesn’t help much.”

  Hoffman checked the files nearest to him. The date was three centuries ago. “Well, I can narrow things down to the last thirty years of the Pendulum Wars, I suppose.”

  “You realize they wouldn’t file this shit under T for Top Secret.”

  “This is the only COG archive left on Sera. I’m just looking for a clue to other clues. Even a single name might shake Prescott down.”

  “That’s what Baird said. Dream on.” Hoffman expected Marcus to leave him to it, but he took a box and started examining its contents. “Prescott’s like Trescu. Immune to the scheming of us lesser mortals.”

  Lesser mortals, my ass. The Fenix mansion probably had a library bigger than this archive. But Marcus had none of the habits of old money and privilege.

  You’re happy being a grunt, aren’t you? Yeah. I was happy being a grunt too.

  Marcus looked up from the folders as if Hoffman was thinking aloud. “There were definitely weird experimental programs. Like at New Hope. The Sires.”

  “But how do you get from that to stalks and polyps?”

  “That luminous vapor in the Locust tunnels was moving around on its own. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “But the only thing big enough to be worth keeping secret is a man-made biohazard,” Hoffman said. “Why would he be so interested in getting specimens otherwise?”

  Marcus shook his head. “He doesn’t give a shit what we think. Whatever it is, he wants to find a way to stop it but he isn’t letting us in on his plans.”

  The worst thing about trying to second-guess a devious asshole like Prescott was tying yourself in increasingly tight knots. Maybe it didn’t matter a damn what was on that disc: so what if it had a formula for getting rid of grubs, or Lambent, or heartburn? There were no labs left to make the stuff.

  Defeatist.

  No, just coming to my fucking senses after all these years.

  Marcus rustled paper and held out a large b
ound book to Hoffman. It smelled of old leather and mold. “Might as well show you this before it hikes your blood pressure. No, he never told me what he did here. But he wasn’t a biologist.”

  Hoffman had to squint to see the page in the dim light. It was an old visitor security log. And there was Adam Fenix’s handwriting, signed in to see some army major long before E-Day.

  “I know,” Hoffman said. “Lewis Gavriel said he met him here way back, remember? It’s okay.”

  Poor bastard. Marcus sounded apologetic, as if he was saying that whatever else his dad had done, he wasn’t responsible for the unwholesome bio-warfare shit the COG had worked on. He was a physicist. He designed bombs, delivery systems, the kind of weapons Hoffman thought of as clean and honest.

  “He wasn’t a monster,” Marcus said quietly. It was an odd word to use, not like Marcus at all. “Just blinkered.”

  Hoffman had reached the age where he felt he had to say what was on his mind there and then, in case he died before he got his next chance. “Look, let’s knock this on the head once and for all,” he said. “Your dad built the Hammer of Dawn, and Prescott, Bardry, and me—we fired it. I don’t know if mass slaughter is morally worse than killing one poor asshole with a bayonet, but either way, stop apologizing for him. We’re still using the goddamn thing to defend ourselves.”

  Marcus just blinked slowly and did that slight tilt of the head that Hoffman always interpreted as disbelief. “Yeah. So we are.”

  Hoffman went back to sorting through the folders on the shelves, not even sure what he was looking for. But if there was anything on that disk that could have saved Vectes, Prescott would have been making use of it already. The sanctimonious bastard thought he’d been put on Sera to save humanity, and deluded or not, that narrowed down his motives. Just blinkered. Hoffman had to concentrate on the immediate threat.

  He knew it all slotted together. He just couldn’t work out how. The piles of checked boxes grew painfully slowly. He must have been working in complete silence for an hour or so before Marcus said something.

  “This might be the last archive of any kind left on Sera,” he said.